


Where You Hang Your Hat

by Destina



Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-16
Updated: 2008-02-16
Packaged: 2018-01-07 03:57:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1115202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Destina/pseuds/Destina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam Carter settles in on Atlantis.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where You Hang Your Hat

**Author's Note:**

> Written for troyswann (Salieri) and posted to LJ in 2008.

The room Sam chose for herself wasn't anywhere near Elizabeth's established quarters. It was small and quiet, sheltered at the end of an empty corridor, but the chief attraction was the unusual windows: long, narrow jewels meant to capture light glittering in from the sea. After so many years spent losing track of day and night at the bottom of a mountain, Sam still squinted sometimes when she stepped into the sun. It was one of the things she was ready to leave behind. 

She left most of the unpacking for later, not that there was much to do. A picture here, a book there, a set of identical clothing like a hundred other uniform sets she'd worn and maintained over the years. The colors were different, the meaning the same. Uniform insignia wouldn't get her far on Atlantis, though. The mix of civilian to military was 70-30, or thereabouts.

Daniel had told her to look at it as a challenge. He'd also said she was about 70-30 scientist/military herself; a chimera, he'd said, which made her roll her eyes. No matter how true, it was still not how she thought of herself. All those years as second in command, or sharing responsibility; sometimes she caught herself looking to the left, waiting for orders that would never come. 

The first few nights, she didn't sleep. Instead, she walked the turrets and observation decks of the city, eyes cast heavenward toward the muted light of unfamiliar stars. No one there to point out their origins, explain their meanings. No one to share them with. One more thing she'd put off until the time was right. 

A life defined by delayed gratification; a sequence of events she could never have predicted. She caught herself thinking about her father, once in a while, wondering if she was closer to him among distant stars that had yet to share their current light with Earth. 

70/30, Daniel said, but now she had to adjust the math. 

**

Elizabeth's mission notes were organized into files, folders, subfolders, all neatly encrypted, concise scientific narratives with a graceful edge of sociological study. Sam skimmed through them because she didn't have the hours it would take to give them her full attention. Interruptions came every five minutes or so, and she was barely acclimated. 

"There's a power problem with the mainframe," Rodney said, barreling through the hallway at the same approximate speed he was speaking. Sam kept pace, listened to his explanation and picked out the important phrases, just the same way Jack had once listened to her. She liked to think her explanations had been delivered with a bit more user-friendly context, but that might just have been her 30%, asserting its ego. 

"I'm thinkin' maybe I should replace Bonner on Parker's team," Sheppard told her, his expression communicating _no, I really shouldn't_ as Sam waited for him to bottom-line the problem. Sheppard shifted around in the chair, walking her through the relationship complexities of a small, incestuously mingled base full of mixed personnel, and looked relieved when she suggested replacing Parker instead, giving her the plum crisis response team command, and thereby solving Bonner's unspoken problems. 

Sam couldn't quite tell what made the colonel so fidgety - there were a myriad of possibilities, from the discomfort of describing illicit liaisons to the fact that Sam was mostly an unknown quantity - but she hoped there'd be time to figure it out. 

"Our trade alliance with the Pellanns will not survive another delay in delivery of products," Teyla told her over coffee, her warm smile a touch more sympathetic than Sam could stand, an unexpected kindness. "They bring us significant information, and I do not think we would like to see this relationship severed."

"No," Sam agreed, dredging up a sketchy summary of all things Pellann from the back of her memory, a monumental effort even a second cup of coffee couldn't boost. "What have we offered them in the past?"

Teyla spent fifteen minutes pleasantly filling in the gaping blanks, and all the while, Sam thought about the stacks of reports unread on her desk, every one of them another story she would have to unfold, a short history of a new home these people had shaped without her. 

And so it went, hour after hour, until she fell into bed exhausted, unsolved problems rattling through her brain like color-coded sheep, ready to be sorted and filed away for the next day. 

Every morning, she'd begin again, and the long days seemed shorter, the problems easier, until one day even Zelenka stopped looking at her as if she might not really understand the deeper implications of x-y+z=goobledygook, and instead gave her the benefit of the doubt. As Sam had mastered the fine art of gobbledygook some years before, she was greatly relieved. 

_It's all working out just fine_ , she typed in an email to the Pentagon, yet to be delivered with the data burst and the rest of their personal communications. 

_Never doubted it_ , came Jack's reply one week later, and an attached picture of a bored-looking camel wearing a saddle and a pink feathered hat. There was some message there, she was sure, but she was too busy laughing to bother interpreting. 

**

They didn't go everywhere together, but close enough that Sam saw the echo of something familiar in their foursome. It seemed she could almost always find them in pairs: Sheppard and Ronon, sparring, or taking a morning run; McKay and Sheppard, putzing around in the lab or the staff lounge; Teyla and Ronon, having lunch in the mess hall, joined by Sheppard and then by McKay, and the four of them, lingering and laughing until the place was deserted except for their circle of four. 

She could remember how it was in those early years of the program, their team before all, against everything, and how it felt to be torn away from it, to share things no one else could possibly understand. So many years gone by, and she could still see the face Teal'c made at Jack's gigantic steaks, and the way Daniel stabbed his fork and his index finger in the air when words weren't sufficient to make his point. Jack had drawn happy faces in his oatmeal, and filled the smiles in with raisins. 

They were nothing alike, and it hadn't mattered a damn. 

_I don't know if they realize_ , she wrote to Daniel, _how precious it is. How much they take for granted._

_Did you take it for granted?_ he replied. _Did I? Do you really think they don't know?_

She ate her breakfast the next morning at a neighboring table, a laptop in front of her, and watched McKay make impatient faces, saw Ronon shove him sideways and steal his granola while Teyla smiled down at her toast; the answer was there, for anyone to see. 

 

**

Every time she passed Ronon in the hallway, he sized her up. Not the garden-variety testosterone-driven sizing-up she was used to from a thousand military men over the years. Not even the sexist evaluation and dismissal she'd received from off-world men on a hundred different missions. This was a look that said she wasn't Weir, and she'd better not even try to make nice, and by the way, she wasn't the boss of him. 

Good thing she had nothing left to prove, or she'd have been sorely tempted. Instead she sighed, and when daily business put him in her path, she included him as she would anyone else, no matter how hard he tried to burn holes in her with his eyes. 

She did make her point on the practice range, however, when Ronon was blowing holes in targets too small to contain the destructive power of his weapon, and she was systematically drilling symmetrical, deadly patterns across all the imaginary major organs. She caught him looking at her sideways, an expression of reluctant respect on his face, nose wrinkled as if he'd smelled something rotten. 

He appeared in her doorway the next morning, one shoulder pressed against the doorframe as if it needed his help to stay straight. "Where'd you learn to shoot like that?" he asked, arms crossed over his chest. 

"My father," she answered. She set her pen down, leaned back in her chair. "Military." 

"Started early?"

"Of course." She met his direct gaze. "Didn't you?"

"Too early," he said. He scratched his chest absently, then quirked a half smile at her, and the next moment, he turned his back and walked away. 

She didn't count it as a victory, exactly, but at least he stopped staring her down in the halls, and that was something. 

_I thought he might be something like you, like you were in the first year,_ she wrote to Teal'c. She wondered what Teal'c would have made of Ronon's attitude; she wondered if a little time would change it. _He's had a hard time of it, but he wants to make a place for himself here._

Teal'c wrote back: _It was unlikely Ronon Dex would be much like me, as O'Neill has mentioned many times I am really something else._

She laughed out loud, and closed the laptop quickly when staff stopped outside the door to cast puzzled looks her direction. 

**  
The first time Sheppard asked her to join them for lunch, she begged off. Work made a convenient excuse, one anyone could understand. She ate with Caldwell instead, a reminder to herself that she had certain objectives, and the better she knew the players, the easier the game. 

It was what she hated about being in command; Jack had warned her about it. It seemed he'd gotten better at it, with time, but there were compromises, and she had to be prepared to make them. 

"Politics," Caldwell said. "Can't stand 'em. Just give me the book, let me follow it. I'm good with that." 

She nodded agreement; regulations were her comfort zone, orders her refuge. 

Her gaze strayed over to Sheppard's table. He was watching her, his expression hard to read. McKay was talking, animated as always, and Sheppard nodded every so often, but his eyes didn't leave hers until Caldwell pulled her attention back. 

She ate by herself the following day, and with Keller the day after that. 

Friday, at dinner, she took her cup of coffee and a salad and went to the table where Teyla and Sheppard sat, playing with a color-changing toy Teyla had picked up offworld on her last negotiation. "Mind if I join you?" Sam said. 

"Was wondering when you'd get around to it," Sheppard said, sliding his tray over to make room for her. 

Sam could count on one hand the number of times they'd persuaded Hammond to join them for dinner, or even a cup of coffee. It just wasn't his way. Probably it shouldn't be her way, either, but then again, she had to account for her 70% somehow. 

**

Even at night, the remarkable windows picked up the tiniest fragments of light and scattered them across the city like fairy dust. Sam sat on the edge of her bed and folded her duffel neatly, then threw it in the last empty box. Her quarters were squared away, everything where it ought to be, even the small reminders of home - a shelf of small pictures, and her mother's china clock. 

She pulled her laptop closer and scrolled through her long-delayed email. There was a picture from Cassandra, camera at arm's length, the better to capture her sticking her tongue out as if she was still ten. An email from Daniel, where he went on at length about Mitchell's obsession with cheating at basketball, and complaining indignantly about elbows to the eye. Also, a brief letter full of misspellings from her brother, with an attached pic of the kids. 

Sam yawned and squeezed her eyes shut. She had an early day in the morning, a full slate of meetings and crises and quite possibly the fate of the universe resting in her hands at some point between 1500 and 1700 Zulu, and she needed her beauty sleep. The laptop went under the bed, along with her socks and boots; easy to grab without thinking, if needed at a moment's notice. 

She put her head on the pillow and stuffed an arm under her head, the better to see the wide expanse of sky in front of her. It was a strange, unfamiliar sky, over a slightly more familiar city, but she could appreciate it on its own terms. 

She drifted to sleep thinking about power conservation ratios, and whether to have someone Earthside send her a pair of fuzzy slippers, and the improbable, practical beauty of camels. 

 

end


End file.
